St Emlyn’s is a virtual hospital developed by educationalists based at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, England. Development was driven by the need to provide educational materials to a work force (emergency department doctors) on a 24-hour basis. It was ‘‘built’’ (with a grant from the NHS Modernisation Agency ) on the World Wide Web as a training resource for specialist training in Emergency Medicine in the North Western (Manchester) Deanery in 2003. St Emlyn’s currently has over 600 patients although not all of these are open to public access.